OTHERWORLDLY:

R. L. Heilbroner, 85, Economist and Writer, Dies (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 1/11/05)

Robert L. Heilbroner, an economist and the author of the best-selling book The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, has died at age 85.

Professor Heilbroner died Jan. 4, according to the Web site of the New School University, where he spent his career and most recently was a professor emeritus at the graduate faculty of political and social science division. The cause of death was not given, and a phone message left for a school spokeswoman was not immediately returned.

"The Worldly Philosophers," first published in 1953, provides a history of world economists from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes. A 1999 article in The New York Times called it "a 'Profiles in Courage' of the great thinkers who shaped modern economics."

Did Ted Sorenson write it too?

MORE:
The Worldly Philosophers at Fifty (Summer 2004, Social Research)

This special issue of Social Research celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Robert Heilbroner’s classic work, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. The book, now in its seventh edition, has sold more copies in the United States than any other book on economics, with the exception of Paul Samuelson’s undergraduate text Economics. Heilbroner’s book remains popular because of his wonderfully flowing and accessible writing style and the colorful detail he provides about the lives of the otherwise faceless giants in the history of “the dismal science” of economics. We learn, for example, that Adam Smith, who lived with his mother until she died at 90 and then continued his “bachelor’s life in peace and quiet,” was so absentminded that “on one occasion he descended into his garden clad only in a dressing gown and, falling into reverie, walked fifteen miles before coming to.” Karl Marx was “not an orderly man; his home was a dusty mass of papers piled in careless disarray in the midst of which Marx himself, slovenly dressed, padded about in an eye-stinging haze of tobacco smoke.” And Joseph Alois Schumpeter was a “would-be aristocrat” who lied to friends about his young wife’s background: “when she was away for a year before their marriage, he explained that she was being properly educated in French and Swiss schools. In fact she was earning her living in Paris as a maid” (Heilbroner, 1999: 45, 140, 298).

These amusing tidbits might be enough to sell the book to one generation. But The Worldly Philosophers has now inspired several. Its staying power comes from its compelling rendition of the great efforts to understand the dynamics of capitalism. These dynamics include short-run economic fluctuations and long-run tendencies, wealth accumulation and its devastating “side effects” in terms of income inequality, poverty, government corruption, business collusion, industrial concentration, and, finally, the connection between these turbulent dynamics and the social, political, ethical, and technological issues of the day. What bubbles up from the pages of The Worldly Philosophers is the tumultuous evolution of capitalist societies over the past two and one-half centuries, and the creativity of the “great economic thinkers” in capturing these complex dynamics. Moreover, Heilbroner shows that such dramatic narratives are of profound relevance to contemporary society and its prospects for the future.

The book has given a sense of purpose and hope to generations of young students of economics. At a recent academic conference session devoted to Heilbroner’s work, a number of audience members--all now professional economists-- spoke of how The Worldly Philosophers had affirmed their feeling that there was more to economics than the dry and politically conservative material they were being fed in textbook form in their college classes. This reaction reflects the multiple layers of The Worldly Philosophers. For all its lightness of style, the book’s subtext is the grand role for economic thought in social progress.

Subtext became text in the seventh, and most recent, edition of the book published in 1999, in which Heilbroner added a new and final chapter with the ambiguous title “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” Heilbroner clearly intended a play on the dual meaning of the word “end”: purpose and termination. Let me consider each of these meanings as I introduce the essays in this special issue of Social Research.

The chapter begins with the modest claim that economics is not science and not even theory, but instead an “explanation system” of capitalism. It is notable that Heilbroner resists the notion of theory (we will see why later), but more important is his argument that the substance of economic theory is not individual choice or the study of markets, but capitalism. Capitalism, for Heilbroner, is a socioeconomic system that cannot simply be reduced to markets, but must consider also the acquisitive drive for wealth and the interdependence of the private and public sectors. With this broad and interdisciplinary scope for economic thought, the purpose of worldly philosophy becomes quite grand. A plausible and engaged explanation of capitalism provides also a logic for thinking through scenarios of the future. But the challenge of worldly philosophy is more than the production of accurate predictions. Scenario building has an inherently normative dimension, since thinking through plausible scenarios allows--compels--a reasoned analysis of how society can avoid disastrous outcomes and promote social improvement:

[A] worldly philosophy has a unique potential to provide the visionary guidance that will help at least some capitalisms make their way as safely as possible through the coming decades. . . . [T]he purposeful end of the
worldly philosophy should be to develop a new awareness of the need for, and the possibilities of, socially as well as economically successful capitalisms (Heilbroner, 1999: 320-321).

This grand “end” of economic thought connects also to its methodology. Heilbroner gives two fundamental reasons why economics should not emulate natural science. First, economics deals with human nature and especially human decision making, which is fundamentally different from the interaction of electrons:

[H]uman behavior cannot be understood without the concept of volition--the unpredictable capacity to change our minds up to the very last moment. By way of contrast, the elements of nature behave as they do for reasons of which we know only one thing: the particles of physics do not “choose” to behave as they do (Heilbroner, 1999: 317).

Thus the reduction of human behavior to utility maximization is both tautological (viewed ex post, every decision is utility-maximizing) and too narrow in its exclusive emphasis on instrumental rationality.

The second objection holds that economic theory--even the most sophisticated mathematical model--is inevitably value-laden. Heilbroner writes:

[W]hat does it mean to be “objective” about such things as inherited wealth or immiserating poverty? Does it mean that those arrangements reflect some properties of society that must be accepted, just as the scientist accepts the arrangements studied through a telescope or under a microscope? Or does it mean that if we were scrupulously aware of our own private endorsements or rejections of society’s arrangements we could, by applying an appropriate discount, arrive at a truly neutral view? In that case, could one use the word “scientific” to describe our findings, even though the object of study was not a product of nature but of society? The answer is that we cannot.

When lecturing on Marx, Heilbroner would often say with amusement that the most contentious word in the title of his book Marxism: For and Against was the innocuous-sounding “and.” Similarly, I would say that the most challenging part of the title of the chapter “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” is the innocent-looking question mark. The question mark refers to the uncertain future status of economic thought. Would economics be able to regain its place as worldly philosophy? Heilbroner is not optimistic. For all the technical sophistication of modern economics, it has failed to accomplish the purpose of a worldly philosophy. That purpose is much larger than most economists today-- caught up in the minutia of solving abstract problems of static resource allocation-- would even imagine. In this sense, the two meanings of the term “end” in the title of the final chapter of The Worldly Philosophers are linked, as the narrow, “pseudoscientific” focus of contemporary thought is leading economics to its demise because of its failure to play the important normative role in society that the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, Mill, Keynes, and Schumpeter played in their day. Heilbroner laments: “The new vision is Science, the disappearing one Capitalism”

-ESSAY: Economics as universal science (Robert Heilbroner, Fall 2004, Social Research)

ECONOMICS HAS BECOME THE IMPERIAL SOCIAL SCIENCE. IT IS THE ONLY branch of social inquiry that enjoys a Nobel prize. It has been celebrated in a massive four-volume, 4-million word "dictionary," through which there runs, like an Ariadne's thread, the assumption that economics has finally escaped the parochial boundaries of its former kingdom of production and distribution, and can now lay claim to a realm that extends from family affairs to sports, from anthropology to political science (The New Palgrave, 1988; Heilbroner, 1988: 23). More to the point, economics has earned the flattery of imitation by its sister social sciences. Its formal mode of argument, mathematical apparatus, spare language, and rigorous logic have made it the model for the "softer" social sciences. Thus it is with the shock of recognition, not of surprise, that we read Jack Hirshleifer's tribute to the "expanding domain" of economics:

[I]t is ultimately impossible to carve off a distinct territory
for economics, bordering on, but separated from other
social disciplines. Economics interpenetrates them all, and is
reciprocally penetrated by them. There is only one social science.
What gives economics its imperialist invasive power is that
our analytical categories--scarcity, cost, preferences,
opportunities, etc.--are truly universal in application. Even more
important is our structured organization of these concepts
into the distinct yet intertwined processes of optimization
on the individual decision level and equilibrium on the social
level. Thus economics really does constitute the universal
grammar of social science (Hirshleifer, 1985: 53).

Economics, according to Hirshleifer's argument, enjoys its imperial status because it supplies part of the "master pattern" of social theory. Sociobiology supplies the other part. Together the two yield a unified social science in which "certain ultimate principles like scarcity and opportunity cost, and the universal bioeconomic processes of competition and selection, will always remain valid for analyzing and predicting the course of human behavior and social organization" (Hirshleifer, 1985: 66; emphasis added).

I do not know how many economists would go along with Hirshleifer's bold generalization, but it is beyond question that an imperial thrust--or its less aggressive, but no less commanding presumption of a universalistic character--can be widely discerned in modern neoclassical economics. (1)

The question I wish to investigate is whether this thrust or presumption is justified--that is, whether economics demonstrably wields capabilities of analysis or prediction, or manifests attributes of a fundamental nature, that set it above its fellow disciplines. My answer is that it does not.

-PROFILE: The worldly philosopher behind The Worldly Philosophers (Peter L. Bernstein, Summer 2004, Social Research)

BOB HEILBRONER AND I BECAME BEST FRIENDS AT THE AGE OF ABOUT six. From that point forward, best has only become better. Bob was a worldly philosopher from the start. Let me give just one example.

When I was nine or ten years old, my aunt and uncle took me to see a play called Up Pops the Devil. In the course of the story, the female protagonist tells a friend she is pregnant but her husband is unaware of this. I was stunned. My understanding at that point of my life was that procreation was the sole purpose of the act of love. No other motivations were involved. On the basis of that assumption, how could a wife be pregnant without her husband's knowledge?

I gave the matter a great deal of thought but failed to come up with an explanation. Then I consulted my best friend, who had a worldly response to my conundrum: "Maybe they did it once and forgot about it," he suggested.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2005 5:20 PM